Mr. Speaker, the issue for us is the tribunal process is not substantive in itself, but it has the potential, and I think a very bad potential, to lock in bad financial agreements and make them worse. That is why we oppose this. The example we use is NAFTA. We believe that NAFTA was put in place to give us a rules based sense of trade. If we are to have international trade, there has to be rules based trade.
We have seen how chapter 11 has been used and how it takes away the legitimate ability of a government to bring forth evidence as to why it has made decisions. If it is being used to simply penalize one company and to go after it, fair enough. Under the rule of law the evidence could be brought forward to substantiate that. However, what was to be the multilateral investment agreement was very similar to chapter 11. We believe the tribunal process is a continuation of basically a bad principle of reporting investor rights above the notion that investor rights are part of a larger common framework of rights in any functioning democracy.